Is OpenStack the New Linux? 185
snydeq writes "As the self-proclaimed 'cloud OS for the datacenter,' OpenStack is fast becoming one of the more intriguing movements in open source — complete with lofty ambitions, community in-fighting, and commercial appeal. But questions remain whether this project can reach its potential of becoming the new Linux. 'The allure of OpenStack is clear: Like Linux, OpenStack aims to provide a kernel around which all kinds of software vendors can build businesses. But with OpenStack, we're talking multiple projects to provide agile cloud management of compute, storage, and networking resources across the data center — plus authentication, self-service, resource monitoring, and a slew of other projects. It's hugely ambitious, perhaps the most far-reaching open source project ever, although still at a very early stage. ... Clearly, the sky-high aspirations of OpenStack both fuel its outrageous momentum and incur the risk of overreach and collapse, as it incites all manner of competition. The promise is big, but the success of OpenStack is by no means assured.'"
Re:Done. (Score:5, Insightful)
Needed webscale and enterprise value there. Agile alone isn't agile enough.
Meta-engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
As a general rule, the only way to build something large and complex that works is to grow it from something small and simple that works.
Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenStack is a Linux distribution organized for deploying a compute cloud. Linux is the new Linux?
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words "We have a new distro, how can we get some free advertising..."
More clound BS? Not again. (Score:4, Insightful)
And something that does everything, no less. In general, this means it does nothing well. Big egos are just the hallmark of failure. Lets see whether anybody even remembers this in 20 years. Personally, I doubt it.
what problem does OpenStack address? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there some deficiency in Linux and the various BSDs that OpenStack is intended to remedy?
Re:Done. (Score:5, Insightful)
I got that with "cloud".
How open can the system be when it runs on someone else's hardware under someone else's control?
OK, maybe potentially big news for cloud service vendors, but I can't the average Linux hobby coder giving this a lot of time or effort
Re:Meta-engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
As a general rule, the only way to build something large and complex that works is to grow it from something small and simple that works.
As a general rule, something simple that works will grow into something large and complex that doesn't work, and no one can figure why.
Re:Oh please. (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a term used called "cloudwashing" that covers inappropriate use of the term cloud, but cloud technology is real and every company in tech is pouring money into this transition.
Anyone who has worked in IT in large enterprise has seen the benefits of virtualization in action; there's an enormous amount of capex and opex savings, and VMware basically dominates the market. There's a reason 99%+ of the Fortune 500 have an ELA with them.
The same principles behind that revolution are now reaching into the public space, and looking to blend the private IT compute farms with public cloud resources as well; plus more apps being deployed as SaaS, and more apps being developed on PaaS stacks; all the technology of big data (eg, Mongo), messaging (eg RabbitMQ), and so on just form a virtuous circle with this trend. Apps become more able to run in generic clouds without requiring very specific hardware control, and thus IaaS clouds become more attractive.
If you're in system, network, storage, or security administration, or IT of any sort, and you're not learning about this, you're basically a COBOL programmer waiting to be put out to farm.
Funny, we just hired two COBOL programmers at $80K each to maintain some legacy mainframe systems. When cloud technology can permit hard core data entry, say for insurance records or the like, then I'll worry. But until then, throughput is more important than an app being able to run from wherever in the cloud. Besides, in my line of business. We don't run apps. We run programs that process millions of secure transactions. We have data entry clerks that key documents and data that can't be captured electronically.
You would probably say that we have our own private cloud. I would say that we have our own methods to allow secure access to our internal systems. By the way, I would predict that there will be COBOL programmers still programming even after cloud computing has been replaced with the next marketing hyped phrase.
Re:Oh please. (Score:4, Insightful)
This reminds me of a guy I knew in ~1994, who was griping that all his experience was in COBOL, and after getting laid off from making $75k/year, he couldn't find another job. At the time, I was in college, and so I wasn't really familiar with the idea of keeping your skills updated...
So I don't know that I would recommend cloud for you; there are reasons to use it, and reasons not to use it. As the technology and ops experience matures, it will be easier to adopt - basically like any tech. But for almost everyone, there are real benefits. Both capex and opex; and some people are using cloud in a way that their capex savings is ~0 (or negative) but their opex savings is huge. (See: Netflix running their entire infrastructure with 3 admins) Program ~= App. I file my expenses through an Oracle app, that runs in a cloud, that automatically fetches corporate card transactions from Visa, and lets me roll them into an expense report.
I'm one of the authors of Securing the Virtual Environment [amazon.com], and my co-author is a QSA, and one of the points of writing the book was to talk about the fact that cloud *can* be secure and can be compliant. (Although in the case of a public cloud, obviously compliance requires underlying compliance by your provider, as well as your own processes) Of course, there are a bunch of risks, too - but there are, for example, cloud services that have passed HIPAA and FISMA audits.
In short, cloud is more than just a buzzword; it's an evolution in the technology that powers IT. I'd say it's more evolution than revolution, but it is more than a buzzword.
Re:Done. (Score:4, Insightful)
So at which number of "servers" does it become a cloud?
Up until about 2-3 years ago we had about 50 or so "Hardware" servers at our company. Which we replaced one after the other with two bladecenters with 24 blades in total, in two different buildings plus NAS clusters, running everything on virtual machines. Those are advertised by IBM as "IBM BladeCenter for Cloud", so at least THEY think that already is "the cloud".
I, personally, have come to think that once you run something in a virtual machine, clustered in a way that one hardware box going down has no effect of your "Application" running it is basically "The Cloud". Of course that has been around for decades "The Cloud" is only a new marketing speak that has come up.